


Nice

by JulyStorms



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-30
Updated: 2015-08-30
Packaged: 2018-04-18 04:30:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4692152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JulyStorms/pseuds/JulyStorms
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hange kisses Levi.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nice

**Author's Note:**

> Hange's story about the person she used to know is borrowed kindly with permission from Cello. (Levi's personal take on the story is my own.)

It’s abrupt, the feel of her lips against his. He doesn't expect it but he's not surprised by it, either. Why should he be? Why should he wonder about anything Hange has ever done when Hange always does exactly what she wants whenever she wants to do it? She’s instinctual like that—

—like him.

She feels that twinge in her gut and she acts.

She’s been that way as long as he has known her and he doesn't expect that part of her to change.

He doesn't want it to.

* * *

 

He never does question the exact reason for the kiss; the moment passes, fleeting as any other small bright point, and he moves on.

His only concern is about the twinge. He thinks about it a few days later when sleep evades him and he chooses to sit at his desk to stare at the wall instead of the shadowed ceiling. Was the twinge in her gut when she kissed him the same as the one he feels when his body knows what to do with a knife or sword or shim of wood? Is it the same kind of instinct operating under different rules? He doesn't know the answer. He supposes it doesn't matter.

* * *

 

He recalls the kiss suddenly, months later, when he rounds a corner and sees two recruits half-hidden in shadow under a crumbling awning. 

Something about the way they're carrying on strikes him as wrong.

He stops it with a bored expression and a too-long lecture about etiquette sandwiched between gross descriptions of the harsh realities of their new life. Hange tells a story every year to those brave or stupid enough to join the Survey Corps—one about someone she knew, once, whose lover was swallowed by a titan. In a frenzy, they’d tried to cut their partner out. She always says that the rescuer burned to death, boiled alive from the contents of the titan's insides, but Levi knows that's a lie: the person who tried it was Hange and she's still alive.

He reminds the young soldiers of Hange's story anyway because things like happen, sometimes. He doesn't know if he agrees with it, with the idea that attachment breeds recklessness, but caution makes good sense and the more these new soldiers utilize it, the better their chance of survival becomes. He wants them to survive.

Only when the recruits look properly horrified does he send them on their way.

In the silence of the empty hall he allows himself to think about it—about the wrongness of their desperate bodies. His experiences are tainted by his childhood, by the slums of the underground. He can't help but find fault in overeager, grasping hands—they remind him of things that are not quite retrievable, memories he knows better than to try too hard to remember.

Hange’s kiss had been different.

It was a product of her instinct, of her enthusiasm, of her need to express herself immediately before the thought left her mind and was replaced by something else.

‘Kiss Levi’ came to her mind for some reason…and she acted.

He doesn't wonder why. He doesn't care.

He thinks about the kiss itself, instead.

It was short and simple and calm. She smiled at him afterward, and when she left him a moment later, her arm, book in hand, had swung back and forth as she'd walked away. He heard her off-key humming until she turned into the mess hall two corridors away.

Nothing about the experience had been special, not by definition, yet the memory still lingers in the back of his mind.

Why?

* * *

 

He figures it out, later, when he’s washing his hair.

It reminds him of the outside world—of that flash of whatever-it-was that he’d felt the first time he looked up and knew there was nothing pressing in against him, nothing holding him back.

The connection is strange, but it's there in his mind. For some reason they belong together: a world without walls and that plain little press of Hange’s lips against his. 


End file.
